Bobby Rush was born on November 23, 1946 in Albany, Georgia but grew up on Chicago's North Side, where his mother was a Republican precinct captain. While serving in the U.S. Army from 1963-68, Rush became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1966-68). In 1968 he went AWOL from the military and co-founded the gangster-ridden Illinois branch of the Black Panther Party (BPP), renowned for intimidating local business people into making “donations” to Panther “charities.” One BPP member recruited by Rush was Fred Hampton, who was killed in a December 4, 1969 police raid on Panther headquarters.

Rush, who named his own son “Huey” after Panther leader Huey Newton, became the “defense minister” of BPP-Illinois and said in 1969: “Black people have been on the defensive for all these years. The trend now is not to wait to be attacked. We advocate offensive violence against the power structure.”

In December 1969, law-enforcement authorities raided Rush's apartment and found marijuana, booby traps, unregistered weapons, ammunition, training manuals on explosives, and an assortment of communist writings by Che Guevara, Mao Zedong, and others. Rush eventually served six months in prison for illegal possession of firearms. Reflecting, years later, on his BPP tenure, he explained: "We were reacting to police brutality, to the historical relationship between African-Americans and recalcitrant racist whites. We needed to arm ourselves."

During the late '60s and early '70s, Rush was a sponsor of the GI Civil Liberties Defense Committee, a front for the Socialist Workers Party. One of his closest advisors at the time was the veteran Communist Party USA (CPUSA) member David Canter, who also mentored a young David Axelrod.

Rush went on to work as a medical clinic director during the early '70s and earned a BA in liberal arts from Roosevelt University in 1973. He left the Panthers in 1974, ran unsuccessfully for Chicago city alderman that same year, lost a race for Illinois state senator in 1977, and worked as an insurance agent from 1978-83. In 1983 he was elected as a Chicago alderman.

Rush’s most noteworthy congressional race took place in 2000, when he defeated then-state senator Barack Obama in the Democratic primary by a 61-to-30% margin. During the campaign, Rush said: “Barack Obama went to Harvard and became an educated fool. Barack is a person who read about the civil-rights protests and thinks he knows all about it.”

In 2001 Rush was ordained as a Baptist minister. “I've tried everything," he said shortly before his ordination. “I've tried black nationalism. I've tried socialism. I've tried all of it. But, to me, … this is the absolute pinnacle." Rush subsequently opened a church on Chicago's South Side and used money from his campaign war chest to fund it.

In 2002 Rush co-sponsored a People's Weekly World banquet in Chicago, which honored a number of communists including longtime CPUSA member Ishmael Flory.

Though Rush is a close friend of both Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, he supported Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential primaries and in the ensuing general election. After Obama won the White House that year, Rush stated that it would be “a national disgrace” to not have his vacated Senate seat filled by an African American.

In April 2009, Rush was part of a delegation of seven Congressional Black Caucus members—one of whom was Barbara Lee—who traveled to Havana to meet with former Cuban president Fidel Castro and his successor, Raul Castro. After the meeting, Rush and his cohorts praised the Castros as warm and hospitable hosts and called for an end to America’s longstanding ban on travel to Cuba. Of his conversation with Fidel Castro, Rush said: “It was almost like listening to an old friend…. In my household, I told Castro, he is known as the ultimate survivor.” Rush also marveled at Raul Castro's “keen sense of humor, his sense of history and his basic human qualities.”

On March 28, 2012, while addressing the House of Representatives on the topic of racial profiling, Rush—in homage to the late Trayvon Martin, a black Florida teenager who had been shot and killed by a “white Hispanic” man in a highly publicized altercation a month earlier—wore a hooded sweatshirt similar to the one worn by Martin on the night of his death. Because the rules of Congress prohibit the wearing of hats or head coverings on the House floor, Rush was called out of order and escorted from the chamber.

Rush is among the House of Representatives' strongest supporters of slavery-reparations payments for African Americans. “The future of race relations will be determined by reparations for slavery,” he once declared.

Also among the staunchest congressional backers of gun control, Rush has proposed legislation that would regulate the sale and purchase of bullets. “Ultimately, I would like to see the manufacture and possession of handguns banned,” said Rush, “… that's the endgame.”

Between 2002-16, Rush paid his wife more than $550,000 from the coffers of his campaign committee. Also during that period, the congressman gave campaign money to at least six other family members. Among them were his brother, Marlon Rush, who collected morethan $10,000; his sister, Judy, who received at least $800 for office management and receptionist work; and his son, Flynn, who was paid hundreds of dollars for polling and petition-drive services.

From 2004-14, Rush gave more than $155,000 in campaign funds to the Beloved Community Christian Church, a non-denominational house of worship which he had founded in 2002 to serve “one of Chicago’s poorest and most fragile neighborhoods.”

Rush once requested a $100,000 earmark for Beloved Community Family Services (BCFS), a nonprofit organization he had created in 2004 to provide “primary health care, preventive education, and social service programs” for the poor. The earmark was ultimately approved in 2008 and was tacked onto an appropriations bill, but it was for $305,500—much more than the amount Rush had asked for. Also in fiscal year 2008, BCFS received a $290,663 grant from the Department of Justice.

Between 2008-16, the Beloved Community Family Wellness Center -- the social services arm of Rush’s church -- was awarded more than $14 million in government contracts, mostly from the Department of Health and Human Services.

In 2013, an investigation by the Illinois-based watchdog group known as the Better Government Association found that Rush and two of his non-profits had failed to pay federal, state, or local taxes on time, and in some cases the delinquencies dated back ten years.

When the Federal Election Commission in May 2015 sent a letter to the treasurer of Rush's campaign committee requesting additional information pertaining to its most recent quarterly report, the campaign (a) disclosed contributions from organizations that were not registered with the FEC; (b) failed to provide proper election designations for certain contributions; and (c) failed to properly describe certain itemized disbursements.

For an overview of Rush's voting record on key issues during his congressional career, click here.